Also, I feel a little celebratory – the last review was the 50th one posted on this site!

A huge thanks for Marc for adding his work to our archive. He’ll eventually be sharing some more reviews reworked from his blog at With Great Power, and may even be writing some original content for us. I’ll be adding scanned images of course, and it all goes towards making that goal of reviewing every DC universe trade paperback seem more and more possible.

It could take ten years or something, but ideally we’ll be able to get caught up in five. We’ll see!

The next book on the timeline (that I have access to) is Showcase Presents: Enemy Ace. I’ve started reading it, but it will probably take me a couple days to get through it unless I really rush it. I don’t want to ruin any enjoyment of it by forcing it all into one sitting (it’s a big book of pre-crisis comics!) so I’ll probably fill in a couple days with some other stuff.

Once I really get deep into the Archive and Showcase books, I’ll probably have to alternate or space those out alongside books later in the timeline, like Elseworlds, or starting a parallel line of reviews at the modern age. Or maybe marvel books. I’ll play it by ear.

I’ll be looking forward to your thoughts on Enemy Ace. That’s one of the many books that I’m not sure whether I should read in B&W or in color (although I believe Enemy Ace has been completed in the Showcase format, but not in Archives).

Lately, with Enemy Ace, I’ve been kind of wanting color (and since I’m a completionist, I’m sure I’ll get it eventually.)

But honestly, those early Kanigher stories are extremely clunky and repetitive. Every story has almost the exact same words – the enemy is like a stubborn bulldog, the sky is the death of us all, the hammer of hell is a killing machine, and he’s lonely.

Seriously, I think sometimes it’s the EXACT same text. And I’m a few hundred pages in with no deviation from the formula. I highly doubt he thought this stuff would ever be collected, haha.

It’s still interesting, and Kubert’s work is worth seeing, but I’m hoping it picks up for the rest of the volume.

Funny you should say that about Kanigher not thinking about his work being collected, because you point out what I think is the main difference between DC and Marvel in the early Silver Age. DC’s stories are much more repetitive, in my opinion, which I don’t mean in a negative way because in some cases that works out wonderfully. But it’s clear if you’ve ever tried to read, say, several issues of JLA back-to-back, that they simply don’t lend themselves to being read in chunks that way.

If anything, DC was more conscious of its comics’ serial nature — it actually counts on the fact that you’ll take a month off between issues, so that by the time you read a new issue you’ve almost forgotten what exactly made the previous one so compelling in the first place.

yeah, it’s something that I’ve become familiar with. I definitely agree, and there are positives and negatives to that approach.

My frustration with this particular volume is that much of the dialogue, and even some of the art, is copied entirely from previous stories. It’s less of riffing on the same theme, or working from a formula, and more of actually just putting the exact same stuff in the next issue.